by Dora Machado
Sariah found the wherewithal to be proud of Mia, of her baby.
She couldn't help but feel that affection was flowing into her as well, that like her blood, it circulated through her child and returned to her enhanced by their unique bond.
A clear sense of warning rattled her mind right before her eardrums popped. There was a surge in her womb. A bolt of stone power recoiled from within her and struck back. Light burst from the prism, blasting the sisters. The last thing she remembered was her belly, alight with ethereal brightness, and the outline of the tiny bones she glimpsed there.
Thirty-eight
SARIAH TRIED TO ignore the grunts echoing in the chamber. A new wraith of a girl had arrived yesterday and had been put into the breeding stall. Her maddened suitor had gone at her like a stag in rut. She had been loud at first, but now it was just her occasional whimpers and his snorts breaking the hall's silence.
But not even the brutality of her last wising was enough to dampen Sariah's excitement. Mia had gotten her message. Somewhere over the keep's massive wall, Kael was near and pondering, she hoped, the half of the tale she had been able to wise. Would he understand?
It could have been a hallucination. Meliahs knew, she had been in bad shape by then. But she was fairly sure she had received a message, no, better, two. It had to be Mia. Lying there, anxiously awaiting the arrival of Celia's guard, Sariah twisted the bracelet around her wrist. She could swear that time had slowed to a trickle, yet the silvery haze was spreading faster than ever. Courage. Faith. Strength. She would need all of Meliahs’ sisters to succeed tonight.
She inhaled a calming breath. Everything had to be perfect. But the wait was hard to bear, and she couldn't keep her mind from drifting back to the amazing wising. The sages and Zeminaya. That stone. Incredible. She had been so close to finishing the job.
She worried about her child. Inasmuch as she tried to block and repair the damage, her belly was swelling bigger, her nipples had grown darker, and cobalt veins crisscrossed her breasts like an engrossment's scribbled lines. Was it nature, working its ways on her? Or were all the changes the quickenings’ untimely doings?
“He's come.” Lexia whispered from her cot next to Sariah. “After three nights’ waiting, he's here.”
Sariah squinted in the red-tinted darkness. The outline of a large figure leaned against the bars at the chamber's doors. A faint clanging came from the door. Celia rose from her cot.
“I'll signal when he's at his weakest,” she whispered, tiptoeing in the darkness.
Sariah waved her bracelet in the shadows. Muted assents came from the cots. At last, the time had come. Not all the women were capable of stone tapping, and not everyone trained was capable of delivering a stunning jolt, but everybody had agreed to her plan and every woman knew her assigned role.
She figured she could count on the jolt of some thirty sets of fingers. Released at the same time, it should incapacitate the guard, buying them time to steal his keys and work their way to the higher door, where the second guard would be similarly subdued. After that, Sariah would sneak into the black granite room and steal the prism while the rest of the women would release the male captives, set the fires, and wait hidden by the outer doors until the guards came to fight the fire. Lexia swore that if she was able to make it to her pledged hall, her peers would protect them. Sariah wasn't taking any risks. She was counting on the confusion to bolt from the keep for good.
A loud moan overtook all other sounds.
“Hush, everyone,” Lexia said. “We need to be quiet.”
A commotion ensued a few cots down the line. To Sariah's chagrin, the guards massed around the pen, calling for the fires to be lit. Meliahs curse her rotten luck. So much for escaping tonight.
“It's Violet,” someone said. “She's gone into labor.”
Sariah went to her next quickening seething with frustration. Violet's shrieks were fresh in her mind. The woman's labor had gone on for three days. Even though she had been taken from the chamber, the sounds of her agony echoed through the hall, tormenting them all. The guards seemed as agitated as the women, and the fires had been kept high all through the nights, preventing any further attempt at escaping. A couple of hours ago the screaming had stopped. A somber hush had descended on the women in the pen.
When Sariah entered the sisters’ chamber, she slipped on a puddle by the door.
“Watch your step,” Belana said.
“It's a mess,” Telana added.
Sariah struggled to grasp the chilling sights before her. Violet lay dead on the birthing chair, face frozen, eyes round with terror, mouth gaping, maimed arms pleading without hands. And the blood. It dripped from the chair and ran in rivulets everywhere, pooling at her bare feet like a rising tide.
“I never had hopes of anything special from her.”
Sariah whirled to find Grimly standing behind her.
“I'm nothing but patient,” the mistress said. “She got her time. Such a complicated birth. Handless and all, the wench wanted to live. She had delusions about keeping her baby.”
Sariah hugged her belly.
“Some losses are to be expected in the struggle for progress,” the mistress said. “That was Violet. Five births, and nothing noteworthy. Do you know what she wanted to trade with me?”
The balmy warmth in the room did nothing to allay the chill freezing Sariah's blood.
“She wanted to trade her baby's life for information about a certain wretch turning wising tricks in my pen and hoping to escape.”
Poor dead Violet. She had killed Sariah as well.
“It's not wise to cross the mistress,” Telana said, licking her fingers.
“Now you can't go back to your friends.” The corners of Belana's dripping mouth curled down sadly.
Her friends. Surely they wouldn't be harmed while they were with child. Grimly would want to profit from her investment, to bring each pregnancy to conclusion. The women of the pen would pay for her trespasses somehow, but the wiserlings were too important. Grimly wouldn't kill them yet. Would she?
“Finish up,” the mistress said. “You have work to do.”
Telana stuffed her mouth full. Belana wiped her lips on her sleeve. It was a testament to the sorry state of her wits that only then did Sariah find it strange that both sisters were sitting at the foot of Violet's corpse, eating.
Belana wiped a black tear from her eye. “It's what we are.”
Telana chewed heartily. “It's what sustains us.”
Sariah looked from one sister to another. A diffusing curtain began to lift from her eyes. The details were coming into focus. Laps wet with gore, mouths dripping with blood; the little body, still bruised and wet from its terrible passage; the tiny head, carefully incised to serve up the brain.
Sariah doubled over and vomited. She wretched until not a drop of bile remained in her body. All the while she pinched herself, trying to wake up from the gruesome nightmare that had taken hold of her life.
Sariah's body was dead. Just as they had taken her voice, the sisters pressed the prism to Sariah's spine and somehow took away the rest. It was done under Grimly's watchful eyes, both as punishment and precaution. Her eyelids still worked, her throat seemed able to swallow, her muscles quivered reflexively and her innards churned in fear. But her eyes couldn't see, her limbs were heavy as boulders and her joints were rubbery and unwieldy. She couldn't even wiggle her fingers. It was the strangest feeling. She was alive and thinking, able to feel every instance of pain and yet trapped in a body that refused her commands.
“Is this a trick?” A familiar voice gusted over Sariah's face. “Is it really her?”
“Look for yourself,” Grimly's unmistakable gruff voice replied. “Isn't that why you came? All those hostages exchanged, all those pledges to ensure your safety, all the arrangements made so that you could witness her captivity. I told you I had her.”
He must have leaned over to inspect her face. His breath smelled of dry mouth, of traces of
pea and ham soup. She didn't need to see him to know him. It was Arron.
“She's just out of a particularly difficult quickening,” the mistress said.
“A quickening?” Sariah heard the repulsion in his voice. “Is that what you call it?”
“Are we playing innocent today? You know as much about my quest as I do.”
“So it's not a lie,” Arron said. “You did recover the prism.”
“Were you hoping it was still at large?”
“And did she wise it?”
“Do you think I'm stupid?”
“Do you know how they punished Adamenes of Hurin when he betrayed the Guild?” Arron said. “They fed him stones, small ones at first, to build up the pain. He died of a rotten, ruptured gut after many days of agony. He passed a few, the stones tell us. The human body's not built for such horror.”
The mistress scoffed. “If I eat stones, you'll be dining right beside me. You and I, well, you know.”
Arron's strong fingers cupped Sariah's bare scalp and tipped her head backwards, holding her fragile brain hostage. “We're not here for show, Grimly. I've got my dampening stone and so do you. No one else can hear us. What is it that you want from me?”
“It's imperative that the Guild is restored to its former glory.”
“And where would that leave me?”
“Restored also. With your lease back and your dignity intact.”
“You demand the roast of my table and yet you give me your scraps?”
“She's the strongest wiser we have.”
“And you?”
“I'd keep the wiserling. That's all I want.”
“You have all of the stones that matter.”
“And you'd have the only wiser who can wise them.”
Curse them both. They were haggling over her and her baby as if they were meat on market day. Why was Grimly willing to negotiate with Arron? What complicated plotting merited admitting Arron into the keep and allowing him to inspect Sariah at his leisure?
Grimly's tone changed subtly. “Perhaps your reports have been exaggerated?”
“I assure you,” Arron said, “there's no exaggeration in my reports.”
“Then what we face here is an equal threat to both of us.”
“I'll think about it.” Arron's boots clicked on the floor as he moved toward the door.
“Why the hurry?”
“A man who values his life is always in a hurry when you're around.”
Grimly's laughter was oddly sincere.
“Sariah can stand a lot of pain,” Arron said. “It's the humiliation that kills her.”
“I'll keep her humble and alive for now, but you need to make up your mind soon.”
The door clicked shut and Arron was gone.
The mistress wanted Arron to do something else in addition to returning to the keep and rejoining her Council. What was it? It had to do with the trouble Celia's suitor reported at the ramparts. Sariah was sure of it. Perhaps Grimly wanted Arron to desist from an assault on the keep, but if that was the case, Grimly would have lured him into the keep and killed him, despite her oaths.
Nay. Grimly needed something else. She hadn't asked him to quit the Shield or return the Shield's command. In fact, she hadn't spoken about that at all. No. It wasn't so much Arron that Grimly needed. It was the Shield Arron commanded. Soldiers.
A cool ladle of water brushed her lips. Sariah drank eagerly. Grimly's breath brushed intimately against her earlobe. “So you were paying attention, child. Good. A witness is always a good advantage, especially when trapped at the back of a shrewd gaming hand. You won't forget this little discussion between me and Arron, I hope.” She pressed the stones on her palms against Sariah's ears. “One never forgets the last sounds one hears.”
Darkness was death's preview and like death, it was both terrifying and forbidding. Pain was keener without light, unexpected and rough. Fear went deeper into her mind's recesses and turned pitch black. There was no sound to Sariah's world, only terrifying, absolute silence. She was drowning deep in her body's wreck, sinking in the loneliness of her inner space.
A slap recalled her from the nothingness. Someone wanted her to obey commands she couldn't hear. The pain of labor struck Sariah as Meliahs’ monumental mistake. It originated in the far distance, growing from tiny squeak to thunderous bellow before leaving her for dead. The child was fighting her womb's stubborn hold like a tiger caught in a net, clawing himself out of her dead body. She couldn't blame him.
The stones quaked beneath the sisters’ stifling den. The scent of lard and olives overwhelmed her nostrils. A quick brush of fur startled her. It was probably Belana's kitten, fleeing from the box. A vision of the odd sisters flashed in her mind, a sight of herself, strung on the birthing chair and dead like Violet, and the women, nibbling on her baby's brain. The sob got stuck in her throat. The goddess wouldn't, she couldn't let that happen. Meliahs might be hard of hearing, but the goddess was no less of a mother to her than she was to this child. She owed her child some protection.
Someone braced her from the back. Someone else clutched her knees apart and yet a third person pushed on her belly with a giant's strength. The pain. She tried to tap into the remnants of the prism power. It sometimes lasted for a day or two after a quickening, settling into her aching joints, burning through her body like a swarm of stinging scorpions. If she could use it to kindle the aberrant connection she had created, she could establish a beacon for Mia. Kael could retrieve the prism and take it to the executioners. Ars could be saved. She waited for a contraction to pass. There. The connection flared. If she could tie it to herself, it would last for as long as she lived.
She tried to convey her thoughts to the baby. Not now. Not safe.
A sense of question filled her mind. Safe?
Sariah knew she was hallucinating, but it was true, safety had eluded her child since conception. She tried to patch her protective weave's torn links, to contract her muscles, to persuade the child with her body that it wasn't safe to be born just now. But the baby was barreling down her birth canal like a catapulted stone and there was nothing she could do to change that.
As her body broke, she thought she understood Meliahs’ quandary quite well—in death the goddess offered the perfection of her gardens and yet in life her children craved the imperfection of the unknown beyond. When it came to their children, goddesses, it turns out, had as few and as dismal choices as mothers did.
Her hips snapped. Her body failed. Time for partings. Please, Meliahs, protect them all, because I no longer can. She thought of the search she would never finish, of the boy she would never know, of his father, the man she loved. With the last of her strength she freed her affection into the dark clouds of nowhere and prayed that it rained upon their faces.
Thirty-nine
SARIAH EMERGED FROM the tenuous depths of nothingness, where life and death blended in a gray haze, where the pain coexisted with oblivion and the faintness of a shallow breath suspended the soul at the crossing. It hurt to draw a deeper breath. Was it a first breath? Was it a last breath? It hurt to think, to feel.
Pain. A touch, ever so tender and tentative. A warm drop on her face, maybe two. A hot breath against her cheek. Was someone crying over her?
She forced another breath. Her lungs rattled like rickety wagons. Smoke scented the air. Was the Mating Hall on fire?
Her limbs were gathered gently. Her body was cradled carefully. She had a feeling of lightness, as if she were flying, separated at last from the sticky trappings of the sisters’ nest. How long had she lain there?
Flashes of consciousness intruded in the flickering darkness. Fresh water, Soft linens. Bone-rattling cold. Her hands ached when the leather muzzles were peeled off and the blocking stones were extracted from her palms. Senseless darkness. Unbearable heat. Perfumed oil lovingly massaged into her lifeless limbs. A tap to her wiser's mind, so slight she wasn't even sure.
A touch of healing brought her back to her sens
es, a cautious probe. She couldn't move, see, or hear, but the stink of burning had eased. She caught a whiff of fresh laurel and spices beside her. It had to be an illusion. Her senses were askew and hardly reliable. A hand guided her fingertips over the scar of a broken eyebrow to the familiar lips that kissed each of her fingers thoroughly. Curse her dreams. They were all too real. Madness was the only fitting explanation to unrequited hope.
But the contact felt real. A hand. The size, the shape, the rough texture of calluses and scars, they were as familiar to her as her own hands. All four of his fingers intertwined with hers in a gentle squeeze.
It had to be him.
The small stone he placed in her palm was smooth and polished. With her palms injured and her links weak and numb, she had to grapple for the simple trance several times before she was able to hold it. It was Kael's telltale imprint, strong, bold, clear. It conveyed no images, only words and a host of his powerful emotions carefully modulated not to hurt her.
“We've come, love, but you know that. It took us too long. The fiery fever got me, but not before the Panadanians were trained and Targamon's rot was contained. By the time we caught up with you, you were trapped. Mia couldn't feel you through the keep's walls. I feared you were dead.” Despite his efforts, his pain seeped into the tale like a scalding tear. “Then she said she heard you through her seal. That message, Sariah. I can't tell you what it did to me. I knew I had to get to you, but Grimly had negotiated a truce with Arron and no one was able to make it through to the keep.”
Sariah realized at once that more than witnessing the agreement between Grimly and Arron, she had been the object of it.
“We met up with Delis, the keeper and his Hounds,” Kael said. “Delis was raging mad at your ruse. The keeper was hurt. He said he lost something you entrusted to his care. He fashioned himself a new claw to fit around his hand's stub once he realized I was set on fetching you.”
